You can see Josh Knobe, of Experimental Philosophy fame, and Paul Bloom, who doesn’t have a blog but has one of them professorship things up at some podunk little school in New Haven, CT, talking about research in moral psychology here.

Comments

It’s interesting that they talk about the mind leaving the body, but when it does it still seems to have many of the same properties that a body does: it’s located in time and space and in the case of a ghost it may have some of the physical features of the body such as a face with eyes, ears, nose, and a mouth. They also mention that God is usually associated with some physical form. A plausible explanation might be that the most basic innate concepts we have about minds and bodies make the distinction between animate and inanimate objects and the distinction between matter and consciousness is not an innate concept but something that arises from a much more advanced inferential process. I don’t think they explicitly state that, but it’s what they seem to be implying. Stories of Greek and Roman gods seem to sort of go back and forth between thinking of the gods as being similiar to super heroes and having bodies and them being like gods that are similiar to the God of contemporary religion. Greek gods were apparently thought of as immortal not because they were immaterial, but rather because of some God-like property that they had.